Ive been a been anticipating Mass Effect ever since I saw the first demo of the game in Amsterdam at the X05 unveiling of the Xbox 360s first slate of games. This was the first next-generation game that I saw with the highest of ambitions: crossing the uncanny valley. The valley is the familiar problem of computer-generated images. The closer they approach reality, the more disturbing the images are, particularly human faces. By trying to do good human facial animation, the developers at BioWare endeavoured to make games as emotionally interesting and visually appealing as movies. As such, this game promised a big leap forward in cinematic storytelling and game play.
It delivered on the first, but not on the second. While the conversational system and facial animation is perhaps the best Ive ever seen in a video game, the game play is maddeningly flawed. Call it Mass Defect.
I know my criticism will annoy a lot of fans out there. It will no doubt anger all of those who poured a lot of work into this high-profile game, but I consider it my job as a critic to call it as I see it. Call me picky. But just as this game gave me some of the finest experiences Ive ever seen, it also let me down.
I saw several demos of the game over the course of its long development. The expectations built to unreasonable levels. I participated in that to some degree. I interviewed lead designer Casey Hudson when the game debuted as an exclusive on the Xbox 360 in November. I was duly impressed with everything that I saw in the demos. But I never got my hands on the actual game until it arrived. And the final product leaves me disappointed.
Mass Effect is a big game. You can play it in a non-linear way and that makes you feel like you are truly exploring a galaxy, Captain Kirk style. Its an open world, or galaxy if you prefer, where you can pretty much travel to the planet of your choosing. The game designers direct your attention by providing you with missions that take you to the key intersections of the games story lines. When you reach those points, the game moves into a movie-like scene where the characters talk to each other. The camera closes in on the faces; the developers arent afraid of showing you moving lips and synchronized speech, as they are in many of the games with lesser graphics.
For those who havent played it, there are actually two parts to this game. One is a conversation system with extremely realistic modeling of characters and their facial features. When you come to a cinematic moment, you watch the characters reveal more of the story.
When it comes to a branching point, three or more lines of conversation appear as text on the screen. You can scroll through the lines and pick the tone and message of what you want to say. The character then speaks the appropriate lines. Most of the time, the character does not mimic the text on the screen. Rather, you pick the subtext, and the character delivers the message.
You can watch the smirk, a bare hint of a smile, and interpret that as a positive reaction to your line of questioning. The female soldier Ashley gives such a barely perceptible lip curl to Commander Shepard, offering a clue to the gamer that Ashley might welcome further inquiries from the commander. You can get some nuance out of the characters.
The cool part of the game and why it took so long to make is that you can customize your character at the beginning of the game and then you run through all of those cinematic scenes with your character in the middle of them. You can also go on missions and choose different companions to accompany you. The cinematic scenes change to match those characters.
As Casey Hudson told me, there are more than 20,000 lines of dialogue available in this part of the game. Thats enough for 20 movies, though you wont encounter all of those lines in a straight play-through of the game, as many of the lines cover alternate stories.
I think the long development cycle was actually part of its problem. BioWare, the Canadian developer recently bought by EA, spent more than 3.5 years working on the game. The team rolled off the development of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic role-playing game for the original Xbox. That 2003 game had an original storyline with deep dialogue interspersed with player-controlled third-person sword play and combat. The team adopted some of the same style of that game, another flaw, in my opinion. I think the Mass Effect guys were stuck in the game play of 2003 and they never emerged with superior game play in 2007. I mean, come on! This is the year of Halo 3. If they had game play that resembled anything close to a tenth of the game play of Halo 3, this would have been the game of the year. But its not even close.
While the KOTOR game play was more primitive and graphically average, the goal with Mass Effect was far more ambitious. The team tried to create realistic human and alien faces, animated by crisp dialogue. It also tried to create more interesting first-person shooter style combat and to wrap all of this inside a riveting story set in an original sci-fi universe. You can equip your soldiers with all sorts of weapon types. The storyline is truly something that I can see lasting over several games.
But heres where it breaks down. The tactical play is horrendous. That wasnt so evident on the early Eden Prime level, but once youre off in the missions to other planets, it becomes overwhelmingly bad. You feel like youre fighting with extremely incapable soldiers.
You never run out of ammo. But youre always shooting these solid mass bullets at the enemy. Every guns sounds and fires and behaves the same, whether its a shotgun or an assault rifle. Stupid. Then, when youre shooting at a target, an orange box appears as the one and only place on that target where you can actually hit them with a mass bullet. Thats not even close to realistic, and counts as stupid No. 2. Then you cant even tell if youve hit your target because your target just keeps coming at you or does not even flinch upon impact, whether their shields are up or down. Thats stupid no. 3. You get a red bar that shows exactly how many times you have to shoot the enemy in order to take them down, no matter whether youre getting in the equivalent of head shots or toe shots. The grenades are equally stupid. They fly in straight lines like hockey pucks on ice until they hit something. That something will often keep running right at you and then blow you up.
This feels like youre playing a game from the 1930s. And yes, I know they didnt have video games in the 1930s. Let me recount a scene deep into the game on the planet Feros. Ignore the fact that I have had to endure countless stupid firefights to get to this point in the game. Ive done my time, so to speak, to get to this point.
At this point in the game, as the player, youre trying to take out this big plant-thing called a Thorian. It vomits or excretes an Asari clone soldier, who bickers with you and fights you no matter what you say to it. I had a couple of capable companions with me, a reptile-like Wrex and more cerebral alien named Garrus. They are tough fighters. But the Asari takes them out with ease in the extremely confined fighting space. Its as if the only purpose they serve is to be cannon fodder. (What, theyre dead? Dont worry. Its not an emotional scene because they always come back from the dead if you complete the battle scene and move on to the next one.)
With a shotgun or an assault rifle, it takes me around 15 shots to take out the Asari, and then you have to take out the Thorian Creepers who come at you in waves afterward. The only way you can really get these many hits on them is to shoot them when they arent looking. And yes, that happens quite often if they are facing the cannon fodder. These Thorian Creeper guys are zombies who actually vomit at you. I was already almost out of grenades and health by the time they came at me. And then they make the guns so that they overheat yep about every 14 shots. You doing the math? So you have to shoot in a reserved, haphazard fashion when youre taking out four or five enemies.
Now it takes me about 10 or 15 attempts to take out the Asari. And you can never skip the cinematics that you have already seen. So you figure that each time you have to waste about two minutes watching a cinematic of an Asari being vomited out of the Thorian. Hows that for major league stupid? So, again, that scene took me about three hours to get through. And its one of five battles with a bunch of Asari clones and Thorian Creepers. This is just one example of the ridiculous tactical battles that you have to put up with to get from one cinematic to the next throughout Mass Effect.
Ive made a sizable commitment of time to this one, but I havent come near finishing it. I went through the beginning scene at Eden Prime, wandered aimlessly through all of the different subplots within the Citadel headquarters space station. And made my way to Feros, where I fell into my own personal hell with the tactical game play quagmire.
People tell me that the story gets better. It does. I know because BioWare showed me a very key scene that was full of emotion as a character had to make a very tough choice about a personal friendship. That cinematic scene, when I saw it demoed to me, was riveting. But the game play is so flawed that its just not worth it to finish it. I feel like I have to move back several hours in the game play to get my characters in shape doing some other task while I forget about the mission at Feros for a while. Thats just not a viable option in a game this long. Its like the game allowed me to make a choice that my characters just werent ready for.
I know a lot of purists out there say I should finish the game and then spout my opinions about it. But I cant abide that. The Microsoft folks once told me that I had to finish Perfect Dark Zero because, they promised, it gets better. That was baloney. Im sure that with Mass Effect, its true. But this aint my fight. If they had come up with Halo 3 game play and Mass Effect cinematics, it surely would be one of the greatest games ever made. But I felt as inept as Homer Simpson running around with a pea shooter in the midst of a melee. There is no excuse for this. I blame the game developers who put me in this losing position.
Maybe this game is just my Vietnam War of video games. Im stuck in the middle. And I dont think Ill ever get out. It has beaten me. And you? If youre into good game play as much as I am, you should forget about this one.
